Cody Comes with Baggage

If you’ve ever opened a Double D Ranch catalog, it’s pretty evident we have a love for all things leather. We love the look of it, we love the feel of it, and man, oh man, do we love the smell of it. We’ve designed everything imaginable with it – from suede shorts to studded leather pillows and a whole bevy of biker jackets. We’ve experimented with it in colors all over the spectrum – from beautiful baby blue to eye-catching aubergine.

But as much as we love creating from scratch, we’ve recently discovered how much we love creating from scraps. Yes, we said scraps.

Y’all probably remember the gorgeous Midnight Cowboy Shopper and Valise bags we brought to you at the beginning of this year. (Geez, was Midnight Cowboy really this year? Feels like a decade ago.) We told y’all the backstory behind them – how Cheryl was inspired by Joe Buck’s ponyhide suitcase, and how we found and teamed up with this talented little craftsman out of a little town in northern Italy. Ringing a bell? (Refresh your memory.)

 Well, we went back to our Italian friends with a vision for a bag for the Cody/30th Anniversary collection: the Saddle Pack Bag. It’s rugged. It’s romantic. It’s repurposed.

Like the bags from Midnight Cowboy, every piece of the Saddle Pack lived a life long before it became part of this beautiful bag. The body of the bag is crafted from old Italian military jackets and the flap closure is created out of old Austrian gaiters, both dating back to the 1960s. The lovely leather straps were originally horse bridles. The leather is supple, softened with age, showing unique signs of its previous life; and each bag is crafted by hand, expertly arranging the pieces of these vintage garments into shoulder bags, meaning by their very nature, no two are exactly the same. Beautiful doesn’t even begin to describe this bag. Exquisite, maybe.